Reign of Hell (Cassell Military Paperbacks) Page 13

  When the dust had settled, there was no sign of the sergeant and his men. Only a wide sweep of devastated land, and here and there a headless body, a human trunk with no arms and legs, a pile of twisted metal, a heap of charred flesh. It was not enough for the Major. He called up the second company, commanded by a Lieutenant Kelz, and sent them off in the wake of the first. They traced the same path, running through the same smoke and the same bullets, running through hell to be killed by the Russians, trampling underfoot the scattered limbs of their dead companions. A handful survived. Barely a handful. A few scattered men forced a small breach in the enemy lines and went down fighting.

  The Major chewed his big fat cigar to ribbons and frenziedly called upon the next company. Their commanding officer was young and new and keen. Fresh out of the school at Gross Born and eager and willing to die for a lost cause. He raised his arm above his head and went galloping off into the arena, yelling at his men to follow him. Like well-trained performing animals, they did so.

  The first salvo caught the young officer in the stomach. The second sliced off both his feet at the ankles. He went on running on the two bloodied stumps for several yards, still waving his arms and screaming encouragement. No doubt as he died he had visions of the Holy Iron Cross . . .

  The attack was repulsed. The flame-throwers were thrown into the action, but before they had reached half-way a rolling sea of phosphorus came belching forth to meet them from the Russian lines. They ran in circles with their clothes on fire, they lay writhing like snakes on the ground and the flesh fell off their bones and stripped them clean and white. Only six men returned from the inferno. One was the lieutenant who had led them.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ He stood downcast before the Major, his face blackened with smoke, his uniform charred, his hair and his eyebrows singed. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but it’s just not possible to get across—’

  ‘Not possible? Not possible? What the devil do you mean, not possible?’ The Major snatched the ruins of his cigar from his mouth and crushed them underfoot. ‘By God, I’ll have you shot for this! Cowardice in the face of the enemy! You’re a disgrace to the German Army!’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. We did our best—’

  ‘Best? You call that your best? It’s a bloody disgrace!’

  ‘In that case, sir, permit me—’

  A shot rang out, and the Lieutenant crumpled up at the Major’s feet. His revolver fell from his hand and went clattering across the ground. The Major made a noise of exasperation. He glared round at the few remaining officers and his glance fell on the youngest of them.

  ‘Dietel! Lieutenant Dietel!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Get out there and show those bloody Russians that the German Army is still a force to be reckoned with! Show me, for God’s sake, that I still have at least one officer who can be relied upon to carry out an order!’

  Dietel was not of the stuff from which reckless fools are made. He had no wish to throw away his life on a hopeless mission. But an order was an order even when it was a death warrant, and he had no choice but to obey. He walked tight-lipped to the door. The Major clapped a benevolent fatherly hand upon his shoulder.

  ‘Show them what we’re made of, my boy! No need to be scared of the scum!’

  Lieutenant Dietel and his men set out on their last journey, covered by our machine-gun fire. Before they had gone even a quarter of the way, they were in trouble. The Major instantly condemned Dietel as a fool and a coward, who would be shot on the spot if he dared come back alive. He turned savagely on yet another officer.

  ‘All right, Plein, it’s up to you! Get out there and clear up the mess that those snivelling swine have made of things!’

  Lieutenant Plein hesitated just one second, and then quite suddenly he plunged forward into the chaos, roaring at his men to keep up with him. Through the smoke and the flames we saw him striding onward. Shells exploded at his feet, bullets whistled past his head, and still he was there, in the midst of it all, fighting like a demon, screaming at a heap of corpses to get up and walk, shooting at a sergeant who tried to run away, advancing ever nearer to the Russian front line.

  The enemy flame-throwers were wiped out. We saw Lieutenant Dietel blown to pieces. We saw Lieutenant Plein and a group of men reach the first of the trenches and engage in savage hand-to-hand fighting. The Siberians were like robots, trained to kill or be killed. They fought with a cold determination, unemotional, impassive, indifferent to either life or death. Plein and his men were having their last fling. They seemed intoxicated with the heady joy of slaughter. Corpses began to pile up, one on another, German and Russian indiscriminately. Men with their throats slit, men with their bellies ripped open, men with their heads hanging by a thread from their shoulders.

  When the killing was done and the small band had been obliterated, the Siberians calmly wiped their knives clean of blood and took up their positions over again. Only one man survived to regain the German lines, and he dropped dead at the Major’s feet even as he opened his mouth to make his report.

  ‘Fools!’ screamed the Major. ‘Fools and cowards! Nothing but incompetent fools and cowards!’

  He stormed away to the field telephone, and we heard him yelling and hectoring down the line, complaining that his battalion was made up of fools and cowards and that he would need far better artillery support than he had been getting up until now if he were ever to stand any chance of achieving a breakthrough. He haggled like an old woman in an eastern market-place over the number of mortars he would need before he would consent to launch another attack.

  ‘Ten? Did you say ten? Don’t be so bloody ludicrous, man! What kind of support do you call that? It wouldn’t hurt a flea . . . Make it twenty and I might consider it . . . I said make it twenty and I might consider it . . . Well, all right, fifteen then. If that’s the best you can do. Make it fifteen, and God help you if you let us down!’

  He threw away the receiver and rounded up the shreds of his battalion for his final onslaught. The first of the grenades started to go over, and the familiar débris of men and armaments began spouting into the air on the far side of the battlefield. The Major stood counting, with one arm raised. As he reached fifteen, he abruptly dropped his arm and leaped forward into the fray. He slipped and fell, scrambled to his feet, waved an arm over his head and ran on with the remnants of his Pioneers streaming after him.

  This time, the attack succeeded. The Russians fell back under the onslaught. Hand grenades were tossed into communications trenches and bunkers. Explosives were thrust into the gaping mouths of cannons. Sub-machine-guns chattered and barked, men decapitated one another with spades and shovels and ran one another through with bayonets. The Major was discovered with a fresh cigar in his mouth, lying on his back by the side of a Russian officer. Both were dead. They were but two among a thousand who had died that day.

  Before we could consolidate the hard-won position, a new attack was launched by the Siberians. Hordes of them descended on us from nowhere, little slant-eyed men, thickset and broad-shouldered, with short legs and long arms, shouting in raucous voices in praise of Stalin. We fought them in the trenches and out of the trenches, slipping and squelching in the blood and guts of the dead, but the Siberians were stolid and immovable and slowly but surely they pushed us back the way we had come.

  All about me men were stumbling, falling, sobbing as they ran. A grenade rolled towards me and I narrowly escaped treading on it. I jumped sideways like a startled horse, snatched it up and hurled it into the midst of a pack of oncoming Siberians. The blast threw me sideways and I landed in a crater, directly on top of a fresh-killed body, lying nose to tail in a pool of its own blood with its head hanging limp and its belly ripped open and spilling out its contents over my feet. I gave a shrill scream of horror and scrambled out again. I began running in mindless panic, but it seemed that the Siberians were all round us, they were firing from all directions at once and I could see no road to safety. And then suddenly I caugh
t sight of Porta, moving backwards and firing from the hip as he went, and I stumbled across towards him, in and out of shell holes, sliding and slipping in pools of blood and oil, in my haste to be at his side. I felt calmer the moment I was with him. Porta was one of the untouchables. Porta was indestructible. Impossible to imagine an enemy bullet ever finding its mark in that tough, scrawny body. So long as I was sheltered behind him, I would be all right.

  We continued our headlong flight, retreating to God knows where. At one point we came across Parson Fischer, wandering in the wilderness with a gaping hole in the side of his chest through which his lung could be seen. One of his fellow-WUs came crawling across the rubble towards him.

  ‘Don’t worry, old man, we’ll get you back safely. We’ll see you’re all right. We won’t let you die . . .’

  It seemed somehow to be desperately important to this man that Parson Fischer should not die. Perhaps in a way he had become a talisman. A symbol of hope. If he could survive, then so, surely, could the rest of them. As long as Fischer lived, it meant that God had not entirely abandoned them.

  A stretcher-bearer came running up, but upon seeing that Fischer was a WU he instantly turned and went off in search of someone more worthy of his help. Morphine was scarce, and it could not be wasted on the likes of Parson Fischer.

  ‘Let me die,’ said the old man. ‘Leave me here and let me die. I am not important.’

  His companion hauled the Parson’s arm over his shoulder and began painfully to drag him towards the illusory safety of a shell hole.

  ‘You’re not going to die. I’m not going to let you die. I’m going to get you back, I’m going to get you into hospital, I’m going to see that they give you proper treatment if it’s the last thing I ever do . . . Don’t moan like that, old man! For God’s sake, don’t moan! I’m doing my best, what more can I do?’

  They fell together into the shell hole. Parson Fischer lay with his head in his companion’s lap, his blood staining the ground. Somewhere near by a shell exploded. Behind them in the forest a machine-gun started up.

  ‘So how’s it going, old man? Say something to me. Say something to me! Say anything you like, but talk to me, for God’s sake! Don’t leave me here on my own!’

  The Parson’s face was grey and sunken. His lips were growing blue. Another shell exploded, a little nearer than the last.

  ‘It won’t be long now, old man. Is the pain any better?’

  Perhaps it was. Perhaps the pain was better. Parson Fischer was silent now. His eyes were closed and his mouth was hanging open. The blood seemed not to be pumping out so fast as it had been.

  ‘Why don’t you pray, old man? Why don’t you pray for us, eh? It can’t do any harm . . .’

  It couldn’t do any harm. It might even have done some good. But the time for prayer had come and gone. Parson Fischer was dead at last.

  ‘The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us if they will. We do not ask for their love; only for their fear . . .’

  Himmler. An address to SS officers at Kharkov. 19th April

  1943.

  Nicolas Kaminsky was a former schoolteacher from Briansk, in the Ukraine. His mother was Polish, his father German, and he was fiercely loyal to the Nazi cause. During the winter of 1941/2 he set out with a handful of like-minded fanatics to wage war against the partisans. He was thirty-five years old, and his cruelty became a byword. He was self taught in the art of killing slowly by degrees and was reputed to have invented more tortures than the Chinese had.

  Himmler heard of him through Obergruppenführer Berger, and instantly began to take an interest in him. He had him brought to Berlin, where he developed a considerable respect for the man’s ability to inflict pain upon his fellow-human beings. From that moment on, the Ukranians achieved almost equal status with Germans in the eyes of the Reichsführer.

  Kaminsky’s career was meteoric. Despite the initial handicap of not belonging to one of the superior Germanic races, he nevertheless became an SS Brigadenführer and divisional general in the Waffen SS in little under three months. His powers were such that not even the highest-ranking officers in the Army dared speak out against him.

  Towards the end of 1942, General Kaminsky conceived the idea of making a German republic of the province of Lokot, which was at that time overrun with partisans and guerrilla fighters. His brigade consisted of six thousand men, mostly deserters from the Russian Army. It was composed of eight infantry battalions, one tank battalion, two sections of artillery, one section of Cossacks and a company of pioneers. In less than two years, Kaminsky and his six thousand had confounded their critics by sweeping the province of Lokot clear of all troublemakers and annexing it to Germany.

  In the spring of 1943, Himmler had the Brigade transferred to the region of Lemberg, in Poland, and there Kaminsky surpassed himself, spreading death and destruction wherever he went. His name became synonymous with hatred and with terror; but ‘we do not ask for their love; only for their fear . . .’

  Down the Side of the Mountain

  ‘Sergeant Beier! Sergeant Beier!’

  We were playing a peaceable game of pontoon when we heard the call. Porta raised an eyebrow at the Old Man, and the Old Man continued calmly to smoke his stinking pipe and study his hand.

  ‘I’ll buy another,’ he said. Tiny gave him a card. A slow smile of satisfaction spread itself over the Old Man’s face. ‘I can’t bust,’ he said, and he laid down his hand on the ammunition box that served as our table.

  Tiny scowled and threw a fifth card towards him.

  ‘Sergeant Beier!’ The call came again. ‘Has anyone round here seen Sergeant Beier?’

  I closed up my cards and made as if to throw them away.

  ‘I think someone’s shouting for you,’ I said. I had a vague sort of hope that we might be able to chuck the hand in. I had been dealt an ace, and it had gone to my head. I had staked the whole of my next year’s pay on a ten or a court card turning up to go with it, and had ended up with a handful of rubbish. ‘Some chap from an anti-tank section,’ I said, twisting my head round to see.

  He noticed me looking at him and came up at once.

  ‘Sergeant Beier?’ he said. His eyes rested a moment on each one of us in turn and settled at last on the Old Man. ‘Are you Sergeant Beier?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve been looking for you for the past thirty minutes! Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Right here all the time,’ murmured the Old Man. ‘What’s the panic?’

  ‘You’re to get your section together and come with me. Lieutenant-Colonel Schmeltz is already on the way with an assault group, and you’re supposed to be joining them. They’re over on the far side of the river. I’ll show you the way.’

  ‘Go and get knotted,’ said Porta, without taking his eyes off the cards. ‘We’ve got better things to do . . . twist me one, and make it small—’

  Tiny obligingly turned up a six. The Old Man stared wistfully at his five-card trick, torn between the call of duty and the lure of a large sum of money. I was in the same position myself, but in my case the choice was somewhat easier to make. I flung down my cards, snatched up my rifle and hastily jumped to my feet, accidentally overturning the ammunition box as I did so. Tiny looked at me sourly.

  ‘Some of us are mighty eager to go off and get themselves killed,’ he said.

  ‘Not at all,’ I retorted. I crammed my cap on my head and pulled my belt a notch tighter. ‘I just don’t like the thought of keeping a lieutenant-colonel waiting.’

  ‘Friend of yours?’ sneered Tiny, who knew perfectly well that I had been sitting there with a handful of rubbish and praying for deliverance.

  Porta’s old mate Wolf turned up to watch us go.

  ‘My compliments to Old Nick,’ he said. ‘Looks like you’ll be meeting up with him before I will . . .’

  I had an uncomfortable feeling that we probably should. For all my expressed anxiety not to keep Lieutenant-Colonel Schmeltz
waiting for us, there was something about this particular mission that I instinctively disliked.

  Our guide hustled us across the bridge in a hail of shellfire. On the other side of the river the ground rose quite steeply, and before we had gone very far we found ourselves in single file struggling up a narrow slope which seemed almost vertical.

  ‘Talk about the bleeding Devil,’ grumbled Tiny, as we puffed and panted and slipped all over the place. ‘More likely to meet Saint bleeding Peter the way we’re going.’

  Our guide turned his head to look at him.

  ‘You could well be right,’ he said. ‘You could very well be right.’

  The Old Man paused for a moment to get his breath.

  ‘What exactly is this?’ he demanded.

  ‘What is it?’ The guide also paused. He planted his hands on his hips and smiled derisively. ‘Well may you ask! It’s a bloody suicide mission, that’s what it is. If you take my advice you’ll cut loose and get the hell out of it just as soon as you can, and before the Reds come down and cut you off.’ He jerked his thumb back towards the bridge. ‘How much longer do you think that’s going to be there?’

  The Old Man stood frowning.

  ‘How about you?’ he said.

  ‘Me?’ The man laughed. ‘I’m shoving off again the minute I’ve got you safely up there, don’t you worry! I’m not staying to see the bloodbath!’

  We reached the top at last and reported to the Lieutenant-Colonel, who looked like something left over from the Flood. His veined hands trembled and his eyes were sad and baggy. Doubtless war was not what it used to be in the days of his youth.

  The captain of the regiment we were relieving gratefully handed over to the Colonel.

  ‘This path here,’ he said, pointing to the narrow slope up which we had just toiled, ‘is the only route the Russians can use to mount an attack. There’s no other way up or down. As you can see, it can easily be held by a couple of machine-guns. We don’t usually get into any trouble at night, it’s a bit risky, but during the day—’ He paused, and shrugged. ‘Well, anyhow, you should be able to hold it a few hours longer. That’s all that’s necessary. Just a few hours, that’s what the General said . . . Just hang on until you see the signal to pull out, and then run like bloody hell. We’ll send up three flares. Three green flares. The minute you see them, give the order for retreat and get back to the bridge at the double before it’s blown up. There’s no other way across the river, so you don’t want to run the risk of getting yourselves cut off.’